Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO • Hacker News Board

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#561

Post by JacobThreeThree » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:32 PM UTC

nprateem wrote: post #415

Arson9416 wrote: post #61

The fact that these people aren't currently willing to "rewind the clock" about a week shows the dangers of human ego. Nothing permanent has been done that can't be undone fairly simply, if all parties agree to undo it. What we're watching now is the effect of ego momentum on decision making. Try it. It's not a crazy idea. Put everything back the way it was a week ago and then agree to move forward. It will be like h…

Yeah this happened recently. Some Russian guy almost started a civil war, but then just apologised and everything went back to normal. I can't remember what happened to him, but I'm sure he's OK...

Can we safely assume that Putin's on the "it's crazy" to rewind the clock side of this debate?

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#562

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:32 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #542

jacquesm wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you can wave away your duty of care to close to a thousand people based on the 'charitable mission' and I suspect that destruction of the company (even if the board claims that is in line with the company mission) passes that bar. I could be wrong but it makes very little sense. Such decisions should at a minimum be accompanied by lengthy deliberations and some very solid case building. The non-profit n…

> I don't think you can wave away your duty of care to close to a thousand people based on the 'charitable mission' What specific duty of care do you think exists, and to which thousand people, and on what basis do you believe this duty exists?

Board members are supposed to exercise diligence and prudence in their decisions. They are supposed to take into account all of the results of their actions and they are supposed to ensure that there are no conflicts of interest where their decisions benefit them outside of their role as board members (if there are they should abstain from that particular vote, assuming they want to be on the board in the first place with a potential or actual conflict of interest). Board members are ultimately accountable to the court in the jurisdiction where the company is legally established.

The thing that doesn't exist is a board that is unaccountable for their actions and if there are a thousand people downstream from your decisions that diligence and prudence translates into a duty of care and if you waltz all over that you open yourself up to liability.

It's not that you can't do it, it's that you need to show your homework in case you get challenged and if you didn't do your homework there is the potential for backlash.

Note that the board has pointedly refused to go on the record as to why they fired Altman and that by itself is a very large indicator that they did this with insufficient forethought because if they had there would be an iron clad case to protect the board from the fall out of their decision.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#563

Post by gumballindie » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:33 PM UTC

This guy is like that creepy ex that told friends to talk to you so you can get back together. Instead he should stay with his microsoft friends and go on his merry way. Let’s see what ai team can the crypto currency lead, when there’s no one else’s work to steal credit from, and let’s see how open microsoft is to sucking in copyrighted material to train their little bots. Perhaps they’ll start with microsoft windows’ source code - as an example of how not to code.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#564

Post by next_xibalba » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:33 PM UTC

tstrimple wrote: post #197

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what antisemitic posts?

This post ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1724908287471272299 ) in reply to this tweet ( https://twitter.com/breakingbaht/status/1724892505647296620 ).

That… doesn’t seem antisemetic. Rather, it seems to criticize western Jews for supporting lax immigration and cultural policies that are against their own interests.

Or are we now saying any criticism of Jews is antisemitism?

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#565

Post by BeetleB » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:33 PM UTC

jader201 wrote: post #7

I will be very sad if there isn’t a documentary someday explaining what in the world happened. I’m not convinced even people smack in the middle of this even know what’s going on.

I expect there will be dozens of documentaries on this - all generated by Microsoft's AI powered Azure Documentary Generator.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#566

Post by JumpCrisscross » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:34 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #550

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> about 700 employees seem to think their livelihood matters and that the board didn't exercise their duty of care towards them It is difficult to see how such a duty would arise. OpenAI is a non-profit. The company's duty was to the non-profit. The non-profit doesn't have one to the company's employees; its job was literally to check them.

To check them does not overlap with 'to destroy them at the first opportunity'. There is no way that this board decision - which now is only supported by three of the original nine board members - is going to survive absent a very clear and unambiguous reason that shows that their only remedy was to fire the CEO. This sort of thing you don't do by your gut feeling, you go by the book.

> no way that this board decision...is going to survive absent a very clear and unambiguous reason that shows that their only remedy was to fire the CEO

The simplest explanation is Altman said he wasn't going to do something and then did it. At that point, even a corporate board would have cause for termination. Of course, the devil is in the details, and I doubt we'll have any of them this week. But more incredulous than the board's decision is the claim that it owes any duty to its for-profit subsidiary's employees, who aren't even shareholders, but some profit-sharing paper's holders.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#567

Post by giarc » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:34 PM UTC

A bit tongue in cheek, but perhaps titles should have time stamps so we know what is new vs old.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#568

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:34 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #543

dragonwriter wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither for-profit corporations nor charities have a general legal duty of care for the livelihood of their employees.

It's all about diligence and prudence. I don't see much evidence of either and that means the employees may well have a point. Incidentally: the word 'care' was very explicitly used in the letter.

> It's all about diligence and prudence.

Diligience and prudence apply to the things to which they actually are obligated in the first place, which the employees’ livelihood beyond contracted pay and benefits for the time actually worked simply is not included in.

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#569

Post by 38321003thrw » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:34 PM UTC

nullptr_deref wrote: post #184

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #88

Guess OpenAI that was actually open was dead the moment Altman took MS money and completely change the organization. People there got a taste of the money and the mission went out the window. A lesson to learn I guess, just because something claims to be a nonprofit with a mission doesn’t mean it is/always will be so. All it takes is a corporation with deep pockets to compromise a few important people*, indirectly gi…

okay, i finally understand how the world works. if it is important stuff, then it is necessary to write everything in a lowercase letters. what i understood from recent events in tech is that whatever people say or do, capital beats ideology and the only value that comes forth is through capital. where does this take us then? to a comment like this. why? because no matter what people think inside, the outside world i…

[flagged]

Re: Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

#570

Post by stavros » Mon, Nov 20, 2023, 9:35 PM UTC

wavemode wrote: post #540

stavros wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, the Anthropic folks quit because they wanted more safety?

This article from back then seems to describe it as, they wanted to integrate safety from the ground up as opposed to bolting in on at the end: https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/28/anthropic-is-the-new-ai-re... I'm curious how much progress they ever made on that, to be honest. I'm not aware of how Claude is "safer", by any real-world metric, compared to ChatGPT.

Ahh, I didn't know that, thank you.